enterprise

Mature agile organizations are introducing continuous delivery as a crucial step to realize their goal of delivering business value rapidly. Andrew Phillips highlights implementation issues about how agile development can fit with enterprise release management policies and governance needs. Andrew outlines proven practices and selection criteria for tools to help you address these issues. Then, he presents a DevOps case study demonstrating the continuous delivery process for building, packaging, deploying, and testing a complex application. Find out about deployment support for server and resource configurations, application binaries, database upgrades and rollbacks, messaging, and enterprise service buses. With the right tools and processes you can develop an open, extensible framework that supports additional services and platforms.

The transition from waterfall-based software development to an agile, iterative model carries with it well-known challenges and problems-entrenched cultures, skill gaps, and organizational change management. For a large, globally distributed software development organization, an entirely different set of practical challenges comes with scaling agile practices. Last year the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group applied agile practices to more than forty projects ranging from a collocated single team project to projects that consisted of fifteen Scrum teams located across the US and India. Geoff Meyer and Brian Plunkett explain how Dell mined these real-life projects for their empirical value and adapted their agile practices into a flexible planning model that addresses the project complexities of staffing, scale, interdependency, and waterfall intersection.

Automating regression testing on large-scale agile projects with multiple independent Scrum teams is not a cake walk. Because there is no single "test team" that performs all the testing-each Scrum team develops and runs independent tests, gaps arise as different automation implementations spring up. One team adds a new function which breaks automated tests, setting back the progress of other teams. Scott Schnier reviews one organization's journey developing a "test community of practice" to coordinate test development and maintenance across Scrum teams. Scott shares the lessons they learned, particularly selecting tools compatible with other developer and tester needs. Learn how Scott extended the JUnit framework to support automated functional testing and how his teams keep the standard that a user story is not really done until all its tests are "green" in the continuous integration, regression test pipeline.

Establishing IT governance and compliance practices is essential for organizations that have regulatory or audit requirements. The good news is that you can be agile and still comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, CFR 21, HIPAA, and other regulatory imperatives. Done well, IT controls actually help you improve both productivity and quality. Bob Aiello describes how to implement IT controls in frameworks such as ISACA Cobit and ITIL v3 that many regulatory frameworks require-while maintaining agile practices. Bob's guidance includes specific examples of establishing IT controls: separation of duties, work-item to change-set traceability, physical and functional configuration audits, and more. Bob explains how these practices help government, defense, and corporations scale agile practices where audit and regulatory compliance is a must.